Just shot a video of the office I work in (above) and then its on to the real work! I am currently making changes to some of my chapters which is involving redoing images and carrying out new analyses in GIS. For those of you who don’t know what GIS is, it stands for Geographical Information Systems and you can manipulate data to display it spatially. So for example, I am creating maps of old routeways through East Lothian and how these correspond to the archaeological evidence. Is it possible that these routes were in existence prior to the Medieval period? Where they are best preserved, they traverse the Uplands (in this case, the Lammermuirs), which is almost devoid of later prehistoric settlement evidence.

As you can see, there seems to be an interesting correlation between the routeways and early prehistoric monuments. The darker areas indicate the higher ground where most of the sites survive. Do the routeways simply pass by these monuments because they are ‘markers’ or is it because these are familiar routes that have been traversed over for thousands of years? I am still deciding!

The sites have been plotted using CANMORE which is the public online database run by the RCAHMS and has been an invaluable resource for my PhD. CANMORE give accurate grid references for these sites however to put them into a GIS, these figures have to be converted into eastings and northings. These are also based on the same OS grid system but are six figure grid references. So for example, a site in my are might have the grid reference NT123 345. To convert that into eastings and northings, it would be 312300 634500. Each grid square has numbers preceding it, in this case 3 and 6, and then the appropriate number of ‘0s’ are added to make it six-figure.

I’ll let you know how it goes later!

(Early routeways based on Roy’s Military Survey Map (1747-1755) and

Graham, A. 1951 An old road in the Lammermuirs Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 83: 198-206

Graham, A. 1962 More old roads in the Lammermuirs Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 93: 217-35